Technical Meetings

The technical meetings are a monthly event, that aims to provide the Birmingham Perl community with an educational night of talks. If you wish to attend, please feel free to come along and listen in.

Talks Wanted: If you would like to do a talk, whether a 5 minute lightning talk, a 15 minutes talk or longer, please let us know and we'll add you to the schedule. If we are unable to add you to the schedule for the next meeting, we will give you priority at a future meeting.

Guest Speakers: Are you visiting Birmingham at some point in the future, and would be willing to give a talk? Or are you based outside of the West Midlands, but would be willing to make a trek over to see us and present a talk? If so, then I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email with details of when you are in Birmingham and the talk you would like to present. I'll then arrange a schedule and confirm.

The Talks

OpenERP is a very flexible open-source ERP system, which handles accounting, CRM, sales, purchasing, manufacturing, and many other business functions.

It is written in Python but has an XML-RPC API so we can control all of its functions from Perl. However, despite OpenERP having an object-oriented architecture the API is quite 'low-level', and using it is a very different experience compared to having an ORM like DBIx::Class.

OpenERP::OOM (Object to Object Mapper) bridges this gap, letting us use Moose classes to represent the OpenERP schema. As with an ORM, the schema and object classes can be extended with our own methods and functions.

With this approach the underlying interface to OpenERP becomes transparent - everything is done with Perl - which means we can write Catalyst models, extend OpenERP with CPAN modules, and use all of OpenERP's functions from our Perl code

After many questions relating to this topic, this talk will explain many of the components of the CPAN Testers eco-system. What databases, websites and APIs are available, and how they integrate with each other, and perhaps most importantly how you can help contribute code.

* = Guest Speaker

Meeting Sponsor

The Birmingham Science Park Aston strategy is focused on a service offering for founders of new technology ventures as well as more established businesses.
BSPA are located in central Birmingham, close to Aston University and the city centre. Occupying a 22 acre campus, BSPA can provide flexible office units and a new multi-occupancys
start-up facility.

About Birmingham.pm

We are one of the UK's largest Perl user groups, representing Birmingham UK to the international
Perl community since 2000. We hold monthly social and technical presentations, and several of our
members are now regular attendees and speakers at the YAPC::Europe Perl Conferences.